Best Practices

With stories of Black Friday UK shopper mayhem all over the news closely followed by Cyber Monday, it’s clear the Christmas shopping season is well and truly upon us. Scores of customers are headed to your brick-and-mortar stores in search of great deals.

But value isn’t all festive shoppers are looking for. Across the board, consumers are also hoping to find exceptional customer experiences that allow them to shop on their terms, using the newest technologies to drive their choices.

For many retailers, this is the “make or break” time of year, accounting for 30 to 70 percent of their annual sales. The point often missed is that while a 30-day shopping window determines survival, the ability to deliver first-rate customer experiences is what brings customers back and determines longer term success.

Improving customer experiences

There is clearly an imperative for exceptional customer experiences at this time of year. Since the festive season represents many consumers’ first interaction with your brand, your ability to bring seasonal buyers back after Christmas hinges on the quality of your customers’ experiences this month. This may be your only time to create a positive impression.

But relatively few brands emphasise the delivery of high quality customer experiences in the Christmas rush. Far too often, customer service takes a backseat to moving as much product as possible with little regard to the experience surrounding it. Although it may be necessary to staff up stores with inexperienced, seasonal workers, temporary staffing without adequate training and a clear sense of company mission to deliver a great retail experience presents a serious threat to the brand.

Alongside an investment in experience training, it’s critical to provide near real time customer feedback in order to stay on track and keep serving up great experiences as a top of mind activity for all staff. Here are a few simple ways to do so:

Empower Local Managers

The worst thing you can to do to local store managers is to funnel massive amounts of unanalysed data and undifferentiated feedback to them and expect them to convert it into meaningful insights, especially during the year’s busiest shopping season. Rather than overwhelming managers with information that really isn’t useful, respect that they need to spend the vast majority of their time on the shop floor. Empower them with real-time customer feedback insights that make clear in just a few minutes what their local store issues are and what they should work on to provide great experiences.

Provide Actionable “Right Now” Strategies

Complex retail reporting tools are in abundance but they don’t always make clear today’s winning moves. Providing actionable, data-based strategies that can be acted upon “right now” is essential. Store managers need to be freed up as local leaders to focus on the rapid implementation and execution of plans to improve the quality of the customer experience throughout the Christmas shopping season.

Leverage Social Learning

It takes time for store managers to learn how to intuitively respond to customers’ concerns. But collectively, your brands’ store managers have a vast base of knowledge about specific strategies and actions that can improve the customer experience during the Christmas season. Consider leveraging virtual knowledge sharing and other technologies that enable social learning across the brand.

In many ways, Voice of the Customer (VoC) tools are your brands’ best resources for improving local customer experiences during the festive season. By implementing the right technologies, you can significantly increase your ability to provide location managers with the real-time, actionable insights they need to truly delight Christmas shoppers and keep them coming back throughout 2014 – and that should add up to a Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year!

I recently received an email inviting me to fill out a customer satisfaction survey from one of my favorite online outdoor equipment retailers. I freely admit that I only opened it out of competitive curiosity. When I opened the email, and it promised to take only two minutes and ask two simple questions, I exclaimed, ‘An NPS survey! ROCK ON!’

But that was me speaking as the survey taker. As a data scientist and survey analyst, I recognized the shortcomings of an NPS-style survey. There’s no way to control the data points in the sample, so this equipment retailer wouldn’t be getting the data required to slice and dice my results in interesting and meaningful ways.

For example, they wouldn’t be able to narrow results down to a particular type of service, a particular shift, or a distinct product. They wouldn’t even be able to do a basic regression analysis to identify key drivers. On the other hand, is it really worth it to swing the opposite way and create an experience-killing 47-question survey? Probably not.

Which brings up one of the major conundrums faced by VoC practitioners today:

There is a fundamental disconnect between the way customers want to share their experiences and the way researchers want to control the scientific sampling of information. The result is friction in the feedback process.

No More “Us Vs. Them”

Consumers want fewer questions. Companies want robust analysis. The smart companies are doing what the consumer wants—but the even smarter companies are finding ways to satisfy the interests of both parties.

Today, there are ways to begin cutting the length and overall friction from your satisfaction surveys today, without sacrificing your useful back-end insights. Here are three things I would recommend to any forward-thinking customer experience practitioner trying to find the fabled frictionless feedback:

1. Use the Power of Text Analytics

Shorter surveys don’t have to mean smaller data sets, as long as you’re asking the right questions and taking advantage of powerful natural language processing engines. Mindshare Monitor™ and Mindshare Discover™ are both supercomputing solutions that can extract profound structured meaning from free-form text.

Learn all you can about using this powerful technology, experiment with it, and find out which of your survey questions have become redundant.

2. Separate Your Feedback Channels

Just because you’re favoring shorter surveys doesn’t mean you have to completely give up on longer market research-style surveys. You can dedicate separate feedback channels to administering two separate surveys simultaneously:

1. A short review-style survey that any customer can comfortably complete.
2. A longer research-style survey providing granular details for analysing new product introductions or marketing research.

Your goal should be to offer your customers a good feedback experience while still collecting enough data to power other types of analytics.

3. Shorten Surveys

Identify which data points are the most important to your goals—and ruthlessly eliminate the rest. Not only will this provide a better experience to your customers, it will drastically simplify analysis. If you’re collecting more data points than you need, you might be creating more questions than you are answers. If you can’t arrive at a decisive action after asking yourself a “so what” question, consider eliminating the metric.

For example, a restaurant survey may have a question inviting the customer to “rate our tabletop displays.” You learn you have an average rating of 73 out of 100. So what? Well, it means your displays should be better. So what? Well, a 10% increase in those ratings should mean people learned more about your product. So what? You get the picture.

Think Forward and Implement Now

Customer tastes and preferences around survey-taking behavior are changing. The forward-thinking customer experience practitioner will see this as an opportunity to start implementing the most advanced review-oriented survey techniques to provide a great frictionless feedback experience to customers—while collecting an even broader data set.

Restaurants, bars and pubs rise and fall based on the experiences they provide to their guests. This can be particularly challenging for multi-unit operators where location managers must walk a fine line between maintaining a consistent brand experience and tailoring the experience to the demands of local patrons.

Managing the Guest Experience

An optimised CEM model should be a priority for any hospitality brand that values the quality of local guest experiences – and it begins with a three-step strategy designed to equip managers with the resources they need to quickly transform guest insights into tangible actions.

Focused Insights

Sending large quantities of unfocused guest feedback to location managers is a losing strategy. Today’s most advanced CEM solutions can empower location managers with daily action plans based on the most recent feedback insights for their location and across the brand. Using sophisticated CEM technology, managers can have an action plan in place within minutes of receiving relevant and location-specific guest feedback information.

Action-Focused Tools

While hospitality chains employ sophisticated feedback solutions, most location managers don’t possess the skills and training it takes to derive meaningful insights from complex reports. A better approach is for brands to equip location managers with technologies that do the work for them. Ideally, managers will be given access to solutions that present focus areas for improvement in a simple, clear user interface.

Shared Knowledge

The social knowledge-sharing capabilities offered by leading CEM solutions can provide several benefits. Less experienced managers gain access to virtual knowledge centres and other resources that work to fill gaps in their brand experience. Additionally, fostering this type of communication within a brand helps to build the brand’s internal community. Regardless of the amount of experience, all location managers have the ability to turn guest feedback data into specific improvement actions that can be shared as best practices brand-wide. This crowd-sourcing helps ensure a consistent brand experience and optimises the value of guest feedback insights.

A higher level of guest satisfaction (and ultimately brand advocacy) is being achieved through the implementation of CEM solutions and other technologies that give hospitality brands the ability to use guest feedback as a key driver of location performance. Instead of giving location managers more data that they need to wade through, these solutions equip managers with the actionable strategies they need to achieve meaningful improvements in the guest experience.

As a father of a toddler I’m no stranger to fatigue. Interestingly that also plays into one of the most common questions I get asked when it comes to customer experience management – What are some ways to reduce the risk of survey fatigue on the part of consumers?

Within surveys themselves there are four key elements that can serve to minimize fatigue on the part of a consumer:

1. Only ask important questions

Survey length is strongly correlated with drop-off rates in surveys. It is important that surveys only ask questions that are impactful to the results you want to achieve. A market insight driven approach to developing your survey based on a combination of cross-brand best practices and brand-specific loyalty modeling is the first step. Loyalty modeling can statistically determine which factors drive key outcomes, like overall satisfaction and likelihood to recommend, for your specific brand. This allows the survey design to prune questions that do not actually lead to useful results.

2. Make the survey appropriate for the medium

Data collection platforms should support a large range of media: computer web browsers, smartphones and tablets, or phone-based (IVR/CATI). Each media has different needs in terms of structure, length, and question wording in order to prevent fatigue. The ability to vary the set of questions, wording of questions and answers, and the visual layout of surveys for different media allows each survey medium to be used most effectively.

3. Give control to the respondent

Fatigue is caused by the mental state of the respondent – “This is taking too long” or “This feels like work.” Surveys can and should be segmented. All respondents are asked a short set of core questions and then given an option to complete a second longer segment that asked more detailed questions. Empathica’s testing with the same set of survey questions shows that adding this optional element reduces fatigue and results in more fully completed surveys.

4. Selective sampling

If it is not possible to create a survey of reasonable length due to the number of factors involved (operational efficiency, marketing, product feedback, etc.) then selective sampling can be used. This essentially allows you to use several smaller surveys at once. Any particular respondent will be asked a specific subset of questions. The ratio at which each subset of questions is asked can be set. For example, you may want 90 percent of respondents to be asked about operational efficiency and 10 percent about the effectiveness of a promotional campaign. In this manner no one particular respondent must answer everything but the total set of survey responses will give you insight across the full question set.

There are also methods to reducing fatigue across surveys:

Multiple surveys at once.

If you have a need to gather information about several discrete topics at once you can use selective sampling (described above). This allows you to invite a large respondent group and those that respond will be proportionally split across your surveys. You do not need to pre-segment your list and hope that enough respond from each group.

Multiple surveys over time (periodic eblasts).

While most satisfaction surveys are ongoing invitations, they can also be supplemented with periodic eblast services. Eblasts are based on specific lists of contacts and can be segmented to ensure that the same respondents are not over-invited to surveys.

Industry research has proven that the majority of consumers are interested in providing valuable feedback to retailers about their shopping experiences. However many companies seem to forget the tenets outlined above and are left struggling to understand why their programs aren’t getting the anticipated adoption by their customers. Plan to prevent fatigue during the build phases of your program and chances are excellent that you will experience higher response rates and less drop-offs.

One of the most common questions I receive is about how a brand should combat negative comments in social media.

It’s true. There are many horror stories that you are most likely familiar with of negative word of mouth spreading like wildfire through social media. Employees and executives behaving badly, questionable product quality, poor treatment of customers – these are the stories that many people love to spread, and many brands in turn are wary of opening up their social media channels because of this. The reality is however that these are by no means the only comments about brands customers are making online.

In fact, customer experience programs that stress active advocacy may serve as the perfect solution for brands concerned about negative sentiment.

There is an old adage in sports that “the best defense is a good offense.” In other words, by being more proactive in any activity, you can reduce the harm caused by any oncoming risks.

In the world of social media and active advocacy this strategy has two prongs. First, by encouraging happy customers to become advocates of your brand, you can effectively build a safety net of positive sentiment throughout the online world that can cushion the negative effect from any negative comments that may pop up once in a while. What better counter to a negative portrayal of your brand online than to simply reference back to hundreds if not thousands of pre-existing positive stories of great brand experiences from your own happy customers.

A customer experience management program can also serve as an offensive weapon against negative commentary through the alert mechanisms that most have. These customer alerts allow brands to intercept unhappy customers at their moment of truth, allowing an opportunity for management or brand representatives to reach out personally to improve their brand experience before any negative sentiment is released to the world.

Customer alerts while simple in nature can be quite profound in their impact. By connecting brands directly to unhappy customers, brands are able to open up a true dialogue with them, to glean often meaningful insights, while also having an opportunity to create more advocates as well. After all, what better experience to share on social media than a brand so dedicated to customer service that they reached out to you in a timely and personal manner to correct an issue that you had reported.

Two facets of a simple strategy to reduce the risk of negative online sentiment the old-fashioned way: leverage positive word-of-mouth and never take a single customer for granted.

With the buzz surrounding the 2012 Olympic Games reaching fever pitch in the UK and an anticipated 11 million visitors due to descend on the capital city, many organisations will be carefully considering how they can manage or enhance their customer experience for the duration of the event for maximum benefit. However, without the right staff and staff management, a solid customer service strategy, and a way to listen to what customers really want, these organisations are probably risking customer loyalty in the longer term.

The good news is that the pitfalls can easily be avoided by good forward planning and putting some thought into how your location dynamic will change throughout the Games.  To start the process here are my top five tips on how to satisfy customers during this exciting period, learned from working with leading retailers and hospitality organisations over the past few years.

Tip #1 – Hire people who like people

Many brands are going to have to rely on temporary staff over the Olympic period, as regular team members take holidays and extended opening hours result in needing additional resources.

We often see customer satisfaction dip when organisations are reliant on temporary staff  who care less about customers and the success of the company, and may be less customer-focussed (school holidays and Christmas being notable examples).

Be as stringent in your hiring practices for temporary staff as you would for permanent staff – ensure that you are getting people who are naturally inclined to be customer-focussed, and a lot of the potential issues will look after themselves.

Tip #2 – Be thoughtful about your staffing rotations

Think about it, when your manager or deputy manager takes the day off, or when you lack experienced team members in your location, it’s ultimately the customer that suffers.

At Empathica, we see this happen a lot with our clients. We have worked with several organisations to identify weak spots during their trading week (Sundays are chief culprits here!) and improve senior staff cover in locations. As a result, we’ve seen massive improvements in customer satisfaction levels through our Customer Experience Management programmes.

Make sure your best and most important people are spread across the week and don’t leave inexperienced staff to cope alone.

Tip #3 – Let your staff have fun

It’s simple – happy staff lead to happy customers. We have seen on many occasions that one of the key predictors of whether a customer will enjoy their experience – and subsequently actively advocate for a brand – is whether they perceived the team to be enjoying their jobs while they were in the location.

Allow your staff flexibility to get into the spirit of the Olympics, and participate appropriately in the major events, and customers will notice the positive atmosphere and respond accordingly.

Tip #4 – Focus on your customers

This seems like a truism, but is worth mentioning. The influx of thousands of Olympic ticket holders from across the globe is likely to deliver unusual demand patterns and a whole heap of associated logistical challenges. When facing this type of challenge, it’s not unusual to observe organisations turning inwards and focussing on things they feel better equipped to manage: out of stock items, wastage, shrinkage…

But you cannot lose sight of the most important measures: including how your customers feel.

To succeed at delivering a great customer experience, you need to understand what your customers want and focus on delivering it. If you do have a Customer Experience Management programme, make sure you know what your key drivers of customer advocacy are, use the programme to listen to what customers are saying, and reinforce great behaviours every day.

Tip #5 – Think about the tourists…and what they can teach you about your customers!

London in particular will have thousands of visitors from many different countries for the duration of the games. I’ve seen organisations planning extra signage in their locations here because they are uncertain that new customers will find their way to what they want; or simplifying their menus to make the most popular items easier to find; or training their teams to be extra helpful in case they spot customers looking confused while in locations.

If you are doing any of these things, great! Thinking about your customer experience through the eyes of the customer is a positive thing. But one question: why did you wait for the Olympics to do it? Imagine if you’d made these changes a year ago. How many more satisfied, loyal customers would you have spending more with you, and telling their friends to visit you?

“What is the one thing that can make the biggest difference to my customers today?”

This is a seemingly innocuous question, but one that can have far-reaching impact. For local managers this is likely a question they ask themselves every day. Their job is to motivate and guide their staff to deliver great branded experiences, and coach them on the little things to focus on to make the biggest impact for their customers.

Getting to the answer to that simple question however, is all too often anything but simple.

Running a location is an all consuming job. Location managers are asked to do many things. In both a figurative and literal sense they’re the ones tasked to keep the lights running on a day to day basis. As such their time is incredibly valuable; from dealing with logistics, to dealing with staff issues, locations managers have little time for tasks that fall outside their immediate duties. In many cases this means managing a customer experience program falls through the cracks.

Customer experience management programs have been used for many years as a mechanism to ensure operational efficiency. In many cases however the results of these programs have hit a standstill. One of the reasons for this is how these programs have evolved into rather complex data analysis programs. All too often programs require managers to focus on time consuming reporting, rather than helping them drive actions and develop new behaviors in their staff.

So how can these programs evolve to help local managers better focus on and understand what can be done each day to have the biggest impact on customers?

Some elements to consider when considering how to drive more action from a customer experience program are as follows:

Simple, clear information

Location managers need answers and focused directions, not more work. These busy professionals need tools to help surface only the information critical to them and to present it in a way that makes sense to them.

Select and align each location with specific top priorities

Location managers are not data analysts – they do not have the time or training to become one. Look for customer experience tools that provide algorithms to analyze the data and deliver insights so that they don’t have to. The right tools can provide specific focus areas and clear target objectives. This allows busy managers to focus their time on executing on priorities.

Action plans to execute behavior change

Knowing what area of the customer experience that needs to improve is just the beginning of a successful customer experience program. If the staff does not change their behavior then the customer experience will not improve. A location manager’s role in the customer experience program should be to coach and motivate the frontline staff to drive behavior change that will benefit the customer.They need the knowledge and the tools to execute this behavior change. The right tools should be able to present an action plan based on best practices for their specific focus areas.

Social sharing of best practices

Locations should be able to learn what actions have been successful in other locations with similar issues. Best practice libraries are living online resources that can adapt to the real world. Location managers (and their regional managers) can use these tools to contribute new actions and give feedback on which actions work well and which do not.

Status monitoring to track progress

Locations need an easy way to track their overall progress as well as the execution of specific staff behavior. In thirty seconds location focused tools should be able to tell a manager exactly what the staff is successfully executing on and not. This enables data-driven conversations based on real customer insights.

Having returned from the annual National Retail Federation (NRF) Big Show conference in New York I am increasingly excited for the opportunities that lie ahead for retailers. Each year retailers and solution providers from around the globe gather to discuss the latest trends in retail and share best practices around how best to adapt to the road ahead.

The central theme of this year’s show was focused around bringing the human element back to the retail experience. This echoes the sentiment that is our raison d’etre here at Empathica – retailers and consumers need to reconnect at a human level. The engine of the global economy depends on it.

Retail truly is the engine of the global economy when you take a moment to study some staggering statistics:

• Retail supports 1 in 4 jobs in the US economy
• Retail in the US is forecast to grow 3.4% in 2012 (compared to estimates of US GDP growth of 2.1% to 2.4%)
• Retail contributes over $2.5 trillion to America’s GDP each year

From the opening keynote by former president Bill Clinton, through the educational sessions I attended, and the conversations I had with other delegates, it’s clear that retail provides a pathway out of the recession. A back to basics approach is needed to running a business. Most people have a favorite retailer where employers and customers’ have elevated their relationship to that of a friendship. If not, then you have heard stories from parents and grandparents of a time when the locally focused small businesses were able to deliver a very personal experience to their loyal customers. As time went on, successful businesses began to grow, and sadly achieved much of this scale by focusing on growth and increasing their points of distribution often to the detriment of those necessary friendships and relationships.

Today’s innovations in technology have created a turning point in the world of business.  Technology is now becoming a tool allowing business owners to rebuild these relationships and maintain them on a global scale.

The challenge that now emerges is how to convert this capability to an actionable model.

• Retailers need to actively solicit feedback from their customers and then engage with them at a deeper level. This can be done in three ways. Use marketing science to understand what drives loyalty. Dig deeper… knowing for example that friendly service outranks other loyalty drivers isn’t enough. The real question is, what are the elements of the experience that build a belief that this brand is friendlier than all others?
• Deliver a consistent brand experience at the ground level. I argue that its more important for most retailers to become more consistent than it is for actual improvement in their overall service quality scores. Reduce the anxiety and make the choice simple for customers by letting them know ahead of time exactly what they’ll get.
• Finally, use technology to help personalize the shopping experience. Social media, mobile phones and the new consumer behaviors they foster have created tremendous innovation opportunities. It’s interesting that one of the competitive advantages online retailers have developed over the last few years is a much deeper personal relationship with many consumers. Recommendations, complimentary products, remembering history and preferences… in many ways technology has effectively allowed online retailers to personalize a highly impersonal experience.

I leave you with an interesting exercise that I was challenged with by one of the speakers at the conference. Each day when we all prepare for work, we should challenge ourselves to complete this phrase “What the world needs now…” (yes I know I can Google the remainder of the Burt Bacharach lyrics). Such a simple yet profound phrase can help put the value of what we all do each and every day in a new context.

Do you know what your customers expect when they walk into your location?

It’s a simple question, though for most the answer to that question can be quite difficult. That’s unfortunate because in many ways the level of success that a business can achieve is limited by how close they can get to truly delivering on those customer expectations.

I was listening to a radio presenter introducing singing sensation Adele recently, what he said stuck with me:

“There’s nothing quite like the feeling, when you’re listening to a song, written by someone you don’t know, who you’ve never met, who somehow manages to describe exactly how you felt at a particular moment in your life…”

What a wonderful introduction to a great artist, and in the context of business a simple yet lofty goal to strive for. As a business, is it possible to have such a deep understanding of your customers that you can create and deliver an experience so exceptional that it feels almost as though your store or restaurant was created solely for them? Segment leaders seem to be able to deliver experiences for their customers that are so in tune with expectations that the vendor/customer dynamic achieves an almost emotional level.

It’s this ability to separate oneself from the competitive pack with truly exceptional experiences that has started to put business leaders in all markets on notice. Products and services may become commodities, but fully satisfying a customer’s expectations can build a more robust level of loyalty. So the next question is how do I get there and where do I start?

When implementing CEM it’s important to think beyond simply the products and technology that will be in play, and look at what your brand is trying to accomplish from a programme standpoint.

I like to look at programme development in 7 steps:

1. Business success modeling

What do you really want to accomplish with the programme?

2. Questionnaire development

What are the right questions to be asking to gather the right data to make informed decisions?

3. Data acquisition

Gather customer feedback through whatever channels or technologies are most appropriate.

4. Report delivery

Report on the initial findings as a first phase of analysis.

5. Solution identification

Perform a deep dive analysis of what drives loyalty to your brand, and what factors can be adjusted to improve on this.

6. Solution implementation

Put the improvement plan into action.

7. Brand advocate mobilisation

Enable your best fans to share their great experiences.

Seven steps to help uncover the formula for delivering exactly what your customers are looking for.

If I were a betting man, and Steve Wynn’s newest car indicates that I am, I would bet your organization is not extracting as much value as it could from your Voice of the Customer (VoC) program.

Too often businesses maintain an extremely narrow focus with their VoC efforts and utilize it purely for front-line performance management. While I would be the first to acquiesce that performance management should be a core tenet of VoC, I would also state that the program should be used for much more.

To give you a flavor of what I am talking about, ask yourself the following questions:

Does Your VoC Program Assist in Testing New Products?

A typical VoC program asks about how a business did today and omits the opportunity to gain insight into new products and services they could offer tomorrow. As a business leader, you should constantly be striving to learn and understand how your business could be adding more value to the lives of your customers. An easy way to begin this process is to simply ask your current customers a few different questions, such as:

• “How could (insert your company name) be adding more value?”
• “You currently use/have used our Product X. Are there any additional products or services we could offer to help you get more value out of Product X?”
• “Please rate your level of interest in purchasing Service X (a new product) from us.”

The questions above are purely intended to kick start the hamster on your ‘idea wheel’, not specific questions that accomplish what I am suggesting. Additionally, I am not insinuating that adding a few questions to a survey replaces your existing R&D and market research efforts. If you test the waters with your customers and ask them what they want in existing VOC channels, you could potentially spur more rapid innovation and significantly enhance your forward thinking efforts.

Does Your VOX Program Inform Customers of Feedback-inspired Changes?

It boggles my mind when I learn about organizations that make fabulous improvements in their products or services based on customer feedback, and they fail to communicate to their customers that this was based on their feedback. Tell customers when you change something as a result of their feedback!

I frequently get asked, “How can I improve my survey response rates?” A simple way to increase your survey response rates is to demonstrate to customers that you are actively using the data they provide. Too often customers think that their surveys go into the ether, and for most companies, survey results do go into a vacuum. Be bold, be different, and celebrate the hell out of customer feedback and what it is delivering to your business. Customers will respond by giving you more feedback.

• Put a brief prompt in your call center IVR telling customers what you did.
• Put up signage in your stores.
• At least do something!

Does Your VoC Program Understand the Context Behind Feedback?

Most often VoC program surveys will contain questions about individual employee or overall experience attributes. Such as:

• “Please rate the knowledge of the individual that assisted you.”
• “Did the associate take ownership of your issue?”

While those questions are good, unless you know the underlying customer perceptions and context of the response, the simple quantitative data they produce may be tough to coach on. For example, Mindshare met with a fashion retail organization that uses a knowledge rating question like the ones above. When we asked the VOC leadership team what ‘knowledge’ in bullet 1 referred to, and how they should coach their store associates on the scores, we received some very different answers. It means “knowledge of fashion trends” or “knowledge of the store’s inventory and product location” or even “knowledge of pricing” etc. All are “right”, but all have very different coaching steps and context associated with them.

If there was no alignment among the 4 people in the room, there was probably a disparity at the field and store management level as well. They needed to quickly get to the bottom of what type of ‘knowledge’ is most important to their customer base, and drive that out into their training programs. To accomplish this, we suggested an insertion of a ‘verbatim’ opportunity, an open-ended response where customers could describe what a ‘knowledgeable sales associate’ was to them. This question was live in their feedback system for a short period of time where Mindshare gathered massive amounts of data which we then utilized our comment analytics technology, and “Voila!” – Instant coaching bliss. They now understand exactly what ‘knowledge’ means to their key customers.

My point here is simple: make sure you understand the customer’s perception of any experiential attributes you are asking about in your VoC program. Without that underlying understanding, your coaching efforts could be a little off.

Continually Innovate on any VoC Program

This is just a sampling of some of the innovative things you can do with an existing VoC program. If you are only doing basic performance management, we need to talk—or talk to your current VoC Advisor, Evangelist, Guru, or whatever their title is—because you are not fully leveraging the power of your VoC program. You could also be leaving precious information and money on the table.

If implemented properly, these insights can be gained in very simple, tactical ways. You can potentially save your business massive amounts of money and provide the enterprise with phenomenal new data. You can avoid survey toxicity, enhance customer experiences, and we’ll all live happily ever after.

Learn more how VoC can help you build a friendlier, more customer-friendly business with Pearl-Plaza today.

Thanks to the internet and mobile technology, it’s become a lot easier to gather valuable feedback from a larger sample of customers. So does that mean that more indirect, “old school” methods like using mystery shoppers has become passé? Not necessarily – but it’s probably not the best method of gathering customer experience insights, especially if it’s the only solution you’re using.

While mystery shopping can still be a part of your customer experience management activities, it plays a supporting role as an auditing of minimum service standards. A trained mystery shopper can tell you whether or not a product or service is being sold in the way it was intended. Is the sales staff covering off key points when describing the product? How hard are they working to close the sale? Is it being displayed properly in the store?  What you won’t learn is how the customer feels about the actual product or the way it was presented to them. What’s more, mystery shopping isn’t overly cost efficient. For every one observation you get in a month, you can get 30 more from actual customers using customer feedback – and while you might be able to chalk up one bad mystery shopping experience to a bad day, it’s harder to argue with a multitude of real customers who feel your store isn’t living up to their expectations.

That’s not to say that mystery shopping can’t serve a purpose for you. You can still use it to provide an audit of your customer feedback efforts that will provide a better understanding of your customers, their expectations and their interactions with your brand.  A focused campaign of mystery shopping on underperforming locations can help uncover the tangible problems in that store or restaurant.

If it’s a true customer reflection you’re looking for, direct customer feedback can provide you with more relevant and more accurate “in the moment” information.  In fact, it’s become the method of choice for companies who are looking to understand the voice of their customers. And the ROI on listening to your real customers who are emotionally invested in your brand is far greater than feedback that comes from someone who’s paid to make observations on pre-determined criteria.

Mystery shopping has historically helped organizations understand the difference between good and bad – but only direct customer feedback allows you to understand great and striving to be great is the only thing that will transform your business.

Learn more about Customer Experience Management solutions.